file not found for all man pages of ganeti package

[lelutin]

Hello! I've just stumbled upon this situation. All of the manpages from the ganeti package seem to be displaying a "file not found" error and thus not displaying anything.

e.g.: https://manpages.debian.org/bookworm/ganeti/gnt-cluster.8.en.html

I can see this error on testing and unstable pages too.

It may just be some spurious generation / hook issue?

[lelutin]

more precisely, the website does render. but in the section where the manpage would be displayed there's the picture of an upset robot and the message:

Sorry, the manpage could not be rendered!

Error message: open /srv/manpages.debian.org/www/bookworm/ganeti/gnt-cluster.8.en.gz: no such file or directory 

[stapelberg]

It may just be some spurious generation / hook issue?

Unfortunately not: the ganeti packages use a very unusual structure for their manpages, which debiman currently does not support. Here is the relevant piece of code if you (or anyone) want to take a stab at making it work:

debiman/cmd/debiman/download.go

Line 377 in 4afba3a

// TODO(stapelberg): ganeti has an interesting twist: their manpages live outside of usr/share/man, and they only have symlinks. in this case, we should extract the file to aux/ and then mangle the symlink dest. problem: manpages actually are in a separate package (ganeti-2.15) and use an absolute symlink (/etc/ganeti/share), which is not shipped with the package.

[lelutin]

@stapelberg oh huh interesting. thanks for the pointers.

I kinda wonder if a bug report should be opened on the ganeti package about this (e.g. rather than special-casing for this in debiman)

[lelutin]

FYI I've opened https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1079396 to see if some solution can be found on the packaging side. I've suggested to them to use alternatives like the php package does

we'll see what happens